How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil (PDF)

Description

The bold futurist and bestselling author of The Singularity is Nearer explores the limitless potential of reverse-engineering the human brainRay Kurzweil is arguably today’s most influential—and often controversial—futurist. In How to Create a Mind, Kurzweil presents a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilization—reverse engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines.Kurzweil discusses how the brain functions, how the mind emerges from the brain, and the implications of vastly increasing the powers of our intelligence in addressing the world’s problems. He thoughtfully examines emotional and moral intelligence and the origins of consciousness and envisions the radical possibilities of our merging with the intelligent technology we are creating.Certain to be one of the most widely discussed and debated science books of the year, How to Create a Mind is sure to take its place alongside Kurzweil’s previous classics which include Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever and The Age of Spiritual Machines.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Raymond Kurzweil (born 1948) is a best-selling author, futurist, and a director of engineering for Google. He wrote in the Introduction to this 2012 book, “The primary idea in my three previous books on technology (‘The Age of Intelligent Machines’… ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines’… and ‘The Singularity Is Near’…) is that an evolutionary process inherently accelerates … and that its products grow exponentially in complexity and capability. I call this phenomenon the law of accelerating returns (LOAR), and it pertains to both biological and technological evolution. The most dramatic example of the LOAR is the remarkably predictable exponential growth in the capacity and price/performance of information technologies.” (Pg. 2)He continues, “There is now a grand project [the ‘Blue Brain Project’] under way involving many thousands of scientists and engineers working to understand the best example we have of an intelligent process: the human brain. It is arguably the most important effort in the history of the human-machine civilization. In ‘The Singularity Is Near’ I made the case that … other intelligent species are likely not to exist… if they existed we would have noticed them, given the relatively brief time that elapses between a civilization’s possessing crude technology … to its possessing technology that can transcend its own planet. From this perspective, reverse-engineering the human brain may be regarded as the most important project in the universe. The goal of the project is to understand precisely how the human brain works, and then to use these revealed methods to better understand ourselves, to fix the brain when needed, and… to create even more intelligent machines…” (Pg. 3)He goes on, “In this book I present a thesis I call the pattern recognition theory of mind (PRTM), which, I argue, describes the basic algorithm of the neocortex (the region of the brain responsible for perception, memory, and critical thinking)… I describe how recent neuro-science research, as well as our own thought experiments, leads to the inescapable conclusion that this method is used consistently across the neocortex. The implication of the PRTM combined with the LOAR is that we will be able to engineer these principles to vastly extend the powers of our own intelligence.” (Pg. 3-4) Later, he adds, “My goal in this book is definitely not … attesting to how complex the brain is, but rather to impress you with the power of its simplicity. I will do so by describing how a basic ingenious mechanism for recognizing, remembering, and predicting a pattern… accounts for the great diversity of our thinking.” (Pg. 9)He outlines the theory: “there are no images, videos, or sound recordings stored in the brain. Our memories are stored as sequences of patterns. Memories that are not accessed dim over time… We can recognize a pattern even if only part of it is perceived (seen, heard, felt) and even if it contains alterations. Our recognition ability is apparently able to detect invariant features of a pattern—characteristics that survive real-world variations… Thus our conscious experience of our perceptions is actually changed by our interpretations… This implies that we are constantly predicting the future and hypothesizing what we will experience. This expectation influences what we actually perceive… The lists of steps in my mind are organized in hierarchies…this list is not stored as one long list of thousands of steps—rather, each of our routine procedures is remembered as an elaborate hierarchy of nested activities. The same type of hierarchy is involved in our ability to recognize objects and situations.” (Pg. 29-33)He notes, “Learning is critical to human intelligence. If we were to perfectly model an simulate the human neocortex (as the Blue Brain Project is attempting to do) and all of the other brain regions that it requires to function… it would not be able to do very much—in the same way that a newborn infant cannot do much (other than to be cute, which is definitely a key survival adaptation). Learning and recognition take place simultaneously.” (Pg. 63)He suggests, “We have two modes of thinking. One is nondirected thinking, in which thoughts trigger one another in a nonlogical way… the triggers that led [a] thought to pop into our mind may or may not be evident… Even if we do remember it, it will be a nonlinear and circuitous sequence of associations. The second mode of thinking is directed thinking, which we use when we attempt to solve a problem of formulate an organized response…our subsequent thoughts and actions will depend on assessments made as we go through the process. Moreover, each such directed thought will trigger hierarchies of undirected thoughts… Our actual mental experience is complex and messy, made up of these lightning storms of triggered patterns, which change about a hundred times a second.” (Pg. 68-69)He explains, “The basic algorithm of the neocortical pattern recognition modules is equivalent across the neocortex from ‘low-level’ modules, which deal with the most basic sensory patterns, to ‘high-level’ modules, which deal with the most basic sensory patterns, to ‘high-level’ modules, which recognize the most abstract concepts… Signals go up and down the conceptual hierarchy. A signal going up means, ‘I’ve detected a pattern.’ A signal going down means, ‘I’m expecting your pattern to occur,’ and is essentially a prediction… There is a great deal of redundancy in the patterns we learn, especially the important ones. The recognition of patterns … uses the same mechanism as our memories, which are just patterns we have learned. They are also stored as sequences of patterns… I maintain that the model I have presented is the only possible model that satisfies all of the constraints that the research and our thought experiments have established.” (Pg. 90-92)He states, “From an evolutionary perspective, love itself exists to meet the needs of the neocortex. If we didn’t have a neocortex, then lust would be quite sufficient to guarantee reproduction. The ecstatic instigation of love leads to attachment and mature love, and results in a lasting bond. This in turn is designed to provide at least the possibility of a stable environment for children while their own neocortices undergo the critical learning needed to become responsible and capable adults.” (Pg. 119)He observes, “It the Blue Brain Project brain is to ‘speak and have an intelligence and behave very much as a human does’ … then it will need to have sufficient content in its simulated neocortex to perform these tasks… there is a lot of learning that must be achieved before this is feasible. There are two obvious ways this can be done in a simulated brain such as Blue Brain. One would be to have the brain learn this content in the way a human brain does… The other approach is to take one or more biological human brains that have already gained sufficient knowledge to converse in meaningful language and to otherwise behave in a mature manner and copy their neocortical patterns into the simulated brain. The problem with this method is that it requires … scanning technology of sufficient spatial and temporal resolution and speed to perform such a task quickly and completely. I would not expect such an ‘uploading’ technology to be available until around the 2040s.” (Pg. 127)He asks, “How do we set the many parameters that control a pattern recognition system’s functioning? … We call these parameters ‘God parameters’ because they are set prior to the self-organizing method of determining the topology of the hidden … models… This is perhaps a misnomer, given that these initial DNA-based design details are determined by biological evolution, though some may see the hand of God in that process (and … I do consider evolution to be a spiritual process…)[later, he explains that “My religious upbringing was in a Unitarian church”; pg. 222]… When it same to setting these ‘God parameters’ in our simulated hierarchical learning and recognizing system, we again took a cue from nature and decided to evolve them… using a simulation of evolution. We used what are called genetic or evolutionary algorithms… which include simulated sexual reproduction and mutations.” (Pg. 147)He summarizes, “It is my view that self-organizing methods such as I articulated in the pattern recognition theory of mind are needed to understand the elaborate and often ambiguous hierarchies we encounter in real-world phenomena, including human language An ideal combination for a robustly intelligent system would be to combine hierarchical intelligence based on the PRTM … with precise codification of scientific knowledge and data. That essentially describes a human with a computer. We will enhance both poles of intelligence in the years ahead.” (Pg. 172)He outlines, “Let’s use the observations I have discussed… to begin building a brain. We will start by building a pattern recognizer… Our digital brain will also accommodate substantial redundancy of each pattern, especially the ones that occur frequently… A very important consideration is the education of a brain, whether a biological or a software one…. I would also provide a critical thinking module, which would perform a continual background scan of all the existing patterns… I would also provide a module that identifies open questions in every discipline… We should provide a means of stepping through multiple lists simultaneously to provide the equivalent of structured thought… We will also want to enhance our artificial brains with the kind of intelligence that computers have always excelled in, which is the ability to master vast databases accurately and implement known algorithms quickly and efficiently… Finally, our new brain needs a purpose… a series of goals… we could give our new brain a more ambitious goal, such as contributing to a better world. A goal along these lines … raises a lot of questions: Better for whom? … For biological humans? For al conscious beings? If that is the case, who or what is conscious? As nonbiological brains become as capable as biological ones of effecting changes in the world… we will need to consider their moral education. A good place to start would be with … the golden rule.” (Pg. 172-178)He asserts, “The issue of whether or not the computer and the human brain are at some level equivalent remains controversial today… The question… is whether or not we can find an algorithm that would turn a computer into an entity that is equivalent to a human brain. A computer, after all, can run any algorithm that we might define … The human brain, on the other hand, is running a specific set of algorithms. Its methods are clever in that it allows for significant plasticity and the restructuring of its own connections based on its experience, but these functions can be emulated in software.” (Pg. 181-182)He muses, “The key issue for providing the requisite hardware to successfully model a human brain… is the overall memory and computational throughput required. We do not need to directly copy the brain’s architecture which would be a very inefficient and inflexible approach.” (Pg. 195)He concludes, “my position is that I will accept nonbiological entities that are fully convincing in their emotional reactions to be conscious persons, and my prediction is that the consensus in society will accept them as well. Note that this definition extends beyond entities that can pass the Turing test… The latter are sufficiently humanlike that I would include them, and I believe that most of society will as well, but I also include entities that evidence humanlike emotional reactions but may not be able to pass the Turing test—for example, young children.” (Pg. 213) Later, he adds, “I agree that contemporary examples of technology are not yet worthy of our respect as conscious beings. My prediction is that they will become indistinguishable from biological humans… and will therefore share in the spiritual value we ascribe to consciousness… We should probably adopt a different terminology for these entities, as they will be a different sort of machine.” (Pg. 223)He admits, “Although I share Descartes’ confidence that I am conscious, I’m not so sure about free will… Nonetheless I will continue to act as if I have free will and to believe in it, so long as I don’t have to explain why.” (Pg. 240)Once we are able to create a ‘scan-and-instantiate’ version of our self, he states, “there are now two of you… What I believe will actually happen is that we will continue on the path of the gradual replacement and augmentation scenario until ultimately most of our thinking will be in the cloud. My leap of faith on identity is that identity is preserved through continuity of the pattern of information that makes us us… biological substrates are wonderful… but we are creating a more capable and durable substrate for very good reasons.” (Pg. 245)For me, this book’s subtitle (which may have been added by the publisher, not Kurzweil, we should acknowledge), “The Secret of Human Thought Revealed,” is inaccurate. His model for how thinking occurs is modeled more on how computers “think” than on, say, neurophysiology. Nonetheless, this book (as all of Kurzweil’s books) is provocative and challenging, and will be “must reading” for anyone seriously studying artificial intelligence, human consciousness, and related topics.

⭐”As the most important phenomenon in the universe, intelligence is capable of transcending natural limitations, and of transforming the world in its own image. In human hands, our intelligence has enabled us to overcome the restrictions of our biological heritage and to change ourselves in the process. We are the only species that does this.” Ray Kurzweil: How to Create a Mind; the Secret of Human Thought RevealedProposition: Anybody who reads, studies and reflects deeply on Ray Kurzweil’s “How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed” will never think the same again. The person who opens the book and follows his argument closely cannot be the person who lays it down. He or she, even against their will, if honest will be in some intellectual turmoil because Kurzweil overturns many fundamentals of contemporary conventions on thinking. His title tells it all: He is determined to pursue the secrets of human brains and reproduce these through Artificial Intelligence.Kurzweil’s ideas are so revolutionary that a prior look at his credentials is useful . He wrote his first computer program aged fifteen and sold it for half million dollars. He was the inventor of the first music synthesizer capable of reproducing the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, the CCD flat-bed scanner, the first optical character recognition for all fonts, the first print-to-speech synthesizer and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. A millionaire many times over, he has received the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in the White House in 2002. The Wall Street Journal called him the “restless genius,” Forbes labeled him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison” and PBS included him as one of the sixteen “revolutionaries who made America” in the past two centuries.Truth in advertizing: No review of this length can possibly explore satisfactorily the mega complexities of Kurzweil’s thought. Kurzweil explores the human mind, determining how it functions, and then relates this to the enormous advances in computer technology. He sets this out clearly in two comparative chapters, “The Biological Neocortex,” and “The Biological Inspired Digital Neocortex.””The goal of the project is to understand precisely how the human brain works, and then to use these revealed methods to better understand ourselves, to fix the brain when needed, and–most relevant to the subject of this book–to create even more intelligent machines.” Already in his previous best-selling book, “The Singularity is Near,” he predicts with great confidence the not-too-distant point at which artificial intelligence will surpass human capabilities, and many computer scientists agree. Kurzweil wants to reverse-engineer the brain, and to do this he begins with an examination how the brain thinks, before then moving on to artificial intelligence and the world of computers.Kurzweil offers a number of provocative “thoughts on thinking” in introducing his study of the brain. He describes how he has been `thinking about thinking’ since the age of twelve and some of the insights this provided. For instance, most people can recite the alphabet, but fail when they try to do it backwards. To Kurzweil this demonstrates our memories are sequential. “They can be accessed only in the order that they are remembered.” Next Kurzweil asks that we reconstruct our afternoon’s walk, the people we saw. Few can in any detail, to which Kurzweil comments “…there are no images, videos, or sound recordings stored in our brain. Our memories are stored as sequences or patterns.” And it is this “pattern recognition” that Kurzweil finds the true function of the brain.Kurzweil argues that our memories are stored as sequences of patterns.” He calls it his “pattern theory of mind.” “Human being have only a weak ability to process logic, but a very deep core capability of recognizing patterns. He illustrates this by quoting chess master Gary Kasparov who attributes his genius to pattern identification. Kasparov apparently thinks like the rest of us one step at a time, has learned 100,000 board positions, that is, patterns. Kurzweil then describes how these patterns (he estimated 300 million are stored in the neo-cortex) are arranged in “hierarchies” in the brainAlthough neuroscientists are by no means agreed on how the brain works, Kurzweil believes he has enough evidence to focus almost entirely on the neocortex, which he credits with being able to deal with patterns in hierarchical fashion. The human neocortex is the newest part of the brain, the outermost layer, thin, two-dimensional, about 2.5 milimeters thick. It is intricately folded over the top of the rest of the brain, and accounts for 80% of its weight. Kurzweil offers a standard accepted description of its various functions. The human brain has only weak ability to process logic, but a very deep core capability of recognizing patterns. Such is the centrality of the neocortex in Kurzweil’s thinking that he calls other regions of the brain–the amygdale, thalamus, hippocampus and cerebellum–the “old brain” the pre-evolutionary brain, the “one we had before we were mammals,” essential for only a few functions. But it was the neo cortex which exponentially accelerated the pace of human learning, from thousands of years to months–“or less” he adds.Putting on his A-I hat, Kurzweil reviews his own accomplishments- culminating most recently in a program enabling the blind to read in all fonts–as they relate to his theories on thinking. Most computer engineers agree that a computer capable of emulating the technical function of the brain is not too far off. Kurzweil goes further: “Ultimately we will create an artificial neocortex that has the full range and flexibility of its human counterpart. There will be electronic circuits billions of times faster than our biological circuits.” “Thinking” will migrate to electronic “clouds,” with virtually unlimited capabilities. The system will make possible billions, or even trillions of pattern recognizers, the essence of thought–including the emotions of fear, sadness and pleasure. (Kurzweil doesn’t indicate whether the machine will have tear ducts.)Understandably, there has been some criticism of Kurzweil, most of all for his venture into admittedly bizarre transhumanism in predicting he will be able to talk to his long-deceased (40 years) father. It must be emphasized, however, that he doesn’t expect to resurrect his father, merely to create electronic circuitry which can be programmed on all his known characteristics–DNA, RNA, personal qualities, quirks, moods, humor (or not). It’s a natural spinoff from his conviction that AI will assume all the qualities of a human being, so that conceivably (with a lot of skepticism) Kurzweil might recreate a robot of his father’s qualities. Challenging this facet of his thinking, however, does not basically undercut his other perceptions on thought. Kurzweil also takes some humorous criticism for his admittedly singular health regimen–taking 200 pills daily and having monthly blood transfusions. It remains to be seen who gets the last laugh.The public has already had something of an introduction to what Kurzweil is projecting in the performance of IBM’s computer, universally recognized as “Watson,” on the television show Jeopardy in soundly trouncing the best human players ever on the show. In February 2011 (eons ago in digital terms) Watson correctly answered correctly virtually every question, including those including puns, similes and metaphors.Two such questions were: (a) Wanted for a twelve-year crime spree of eating King Hothgar’s warriors: officer Beowulf has been assigned the case garment worn by a child, perhaps aboard an operatic ship, and (b) In act three of an 1846 Verdi opera, this Scourge of God is stabbed to death by his love, Odabella. (Watson is not infallible, Watson’s performance is beyond belief–and right in the AI direction Kurzweil is projecting. It (or is it “he? she?)) runs on 90 IBM 750 servers with 15 terabytes of RAM and 2,800 processors operating in parallel. It’s preloaded with dozens of encyclopedias, news articles, internet connections. It contains all of Wikipedia. This data base is humongous, far beyond the capability of the human brain. Watson scans two million pages in three seconds. Kurzweil bristles at criticism that Watson only works through statistical probabilities rather than “true” understanding. So do humans, he retorts. “One could just as easily dismiss the distributed neurotransmitter concentrations and redundant connection patterns i n the human cortex as `statistical information.'” By 2020, says Kurzweil, “we’ll have at least in a routine personal computer type computer (power) about equal to the human brain.” “…at today’s rate of change,” he adds, “we will achieve an amount of progress equivalent to that of the whole 20th century in 14 years.”Regardless of how one judges the multiple facets of Kurzweil’s theories, he clearly established two indisputable facts shaping our lives. Research, from neuroscience to psychiatry to physical monitoring through such techniques as MRI imaging, is providing new insights into the biological mind at exponential speeds. Parallel to this, understanding of the digital world is progressing even more rapidly, with the “singularity” point– where biological brain and the digital world connect–not . And, yes, what if things take a bad turn and the computers get out of hand and turn on their masters, as with “Hal” in “2000: Space Odyssey” who goes berserk and turns on his creators. Ray Kurzweil makes an unassailable case that it’s time to begin thinking more profoundly about thinking.far away. Indeed, for most persons the distinction between “I” and “my IPhone” is blurring–the computer virtually a `brain extender’ of our selves. Kurzweil describes how when Google shut down he thought “part of my brain was going on strike.” It makes clear, “how thoroughly we have already outsourced parts of our thinking to the cloud of computing.” Clearly it’s time to begin to think through the ramifications of this, everything from robotics to the cyber world

⭐Throughout the book, Kurzweil switches between asserting very general, accepted ideas which have been the consensus in such domains as neuroscience (while hinting that they are his own thinking), and confidently asserting very general, speculative and unsubstantiated ideas, then attaching a fancy name to them. His PRTM (pattern recognition theory of mind – sigh), is based on the idea that the algorithm used by the neocortex in processing is uniform across the entire structure. He provides no evidence for this besides some silly calculations about the informational content of the genome. This is an area about which very little is known but the fact that the cellular structure of cortex varies in a way that is visible to the human eye really should be enough to give him pause. Worse still is that his “ideas” are almost exactly the same as those of Jeff Hawkins (just presented in a more arrogant way).A very disappointing read, please don’t waste your time with it.

⭐Compared to “Surviving AI” by Colum Chase, which was the first book I’ve read on the subject, this is a very challenging read. I confess I skipped many pages, unable to follow the specialist lingo and associated equations.Nevertheless, I did manage to gain some – though very shallow – understanding of what those Silicon Valley dreamers are up to. Ray Kurzweil certainly is a dreamer. He ponders the questions of consciousness, free will, and identity, in order to convince us that, whatever shape or form AI takes when it arrives, it is not going to be fundamentally different from what we are now – just smarter, more efficient, and more durable. He seems to be fully convinced that it will be in a kind of symbiosis with us, or an extension of us, and that it is our destiny to infuse the whole universe with our post-biological human intelligence. I was very glad to see those dreams written down by someone else, someone who actually can and does pursue them actively. I share that dream, but I don’t have as much confidence in it. Probably that’s why Kurzweil devoted his life to it, and I’m just a sceptical observer!

⭐This book was given the title it has to sell more copies. Kurzweil doesn’t reveal any secrets and doesn’t describe any methods that haven’t been around for a long time in academia and industry already.As a software engineer working on pattern recognition systems I bought this book as soon as it was available, the book gave me a lot of ideas and I’m very happy I bought it. The central thesis seems to be the same as Jeff Hawkins’ On Intelligence – obviously a big influence for Kurzweil – but with a focus on developments since On Intelligence was published.Kurzweil got employed at Google very shortly after publishing this book so he could lead a team to create the mind that he’s described. He’s said in interviews that he left some details out of the book because he didn’t want to give too much away.Overall a good read that will provoke a lot of constructive thought, but don’t expect for anyone to actually build a mind based on just this book.

⭐Ray Kurzweil has a massive ego, and when he’s not talking about himself or his asserted predictions or the companies he’s founded he might speak about something interesting about neuroscience or AI. All in all, this book has some interesting ideas and some that sound absurd (e.g. chapter 9).

⭐A detailed challenging and thought provoking book. It raises serious questions regarding how ‘A.I.’ is progressing toward a state of total human control when A.I. is patched into the brain, and, it seems to me at any rather like a move toward total control of the many by the few especially the prominent’few’ in Silicone Valley where the suthor Ray Kurzweil is a prominent figure.

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